After people figured out that runes from their past could work, Doyle quickly lost interest. Well, that isn't quite true. While he avoided leveling his rune skill, that didn't mean the runes weren't of interest to him. He just already knew all the runes people had figured out, if only because they all basically came from the same source. Ancient runes weren't exactly a common area of study. Sure, some people knew certain ones such as a rune for "strength". You know, because they had it tattooed on themselves.

However, there was a big difference between a foreign language and an actual system of magical runes. Some could serve double duty, but living languages had a hard time retaining the mystique needed. Sure, some people might find a foreign language to be "magical" and put strange meanings into it. Except then you have the entire speaking population talking about how it's going to be a sunny day without imbuing some sort of power to the sun. This fact really disappointed the Weeaboo crowd.

Many dead or near dead languages, on the other hand, tended to pick up mystique like it was on clearance. Doyle could certainly see some indigenous people being a bit miffed in a few years once they find out what people have been doing with their languages. Though it isn't like such languages haven't been used as a code language during wars, so being abused for magic wouldn't be a completely unique situation.

Though with this little bit of drama mostly wrapped up, Doyle felt a little lost. He had 13 floors, a bunch of stats, some interesting skills, and a seemingly endless supply of adventurers to delve into his dungeon. Except they weren't doing a good job of that last one.

Ally had assured him that dungeon cores just leveled slower and to be fair, leveling slowly was actually advantageous. Most people in town had more than twice his levels at this point and yet from the little snippets he and Ally listened in on, less than a third his total stats. Doyle had a bit over a thousand stat points right now! That was a crazy disparity, especially since if he suddenly gained levels to match, it would be an even bigger divide.

Such a difference was not normal, no matter what Ally said. The likely culprit? It was obvious enough. Too few people actually delved his dungeon! The sixth floor was simply too effective of a farming location. Worse, they needed that, as even with all the steak being taken out every day, news was filtering back of people without food.

There were no farms, ranches, or fisheries. Even with superhuman strength, it still took a lot of effort to till new fields and crops still took time to grow. If you had the seeds for in the first place. The small seed display at the local grocery store isn't going to be enough to feed everyone. Nevermind the fact that the time to plant was past.

Doyle wasn't bored, but that might just be from being a dungeon core as he didn't really have anything to do. There just want a challenge. Even Ace, Jim, and their teams seemed hard stuck in floor twelve. Though watching them attempt, it was always fun!

"This is not fun!", Jim groans to himself. The eleventh floor was a challenge, but once they shored up their poison resistance, more of a slog than anything else. Floor twelve though? The very first time they almost lost them multiple people!

Like some sort of corn maze, the floor was a seemingly endless field of grass taller than they are with paths cut through it. Attempts to get a peek over the top never seemed to work out as the very paths themselves seemed to take joy in changing. And don't even get him started on when the team tried to just push through the grass!

It honestly might not even be that big of a floor, because it seems way too many paths lead back to the entrance portal. There just isn't any way to judge the actual size, as all attempts at making a map failed. If it wasn't for the fact you did seem to end up at the entrance once or twice an hour, people might end up dying here from dehydration.

Not that the monsters would let them get that far gone. Even now, Jim could hear a couple packs howling in the distance as if it was a full moon. And speaking of the moon, well, lighting in general, this floor seemed designed to be spooky!

Strange nonsense orbs of light floating in the sky, creating odd shadows where they shouldn't be. Definitely set up to help those damn lesser shadow wolves. They had been on some of the earlier floors, but here they really showed their strength.

Whole pack of them can pop out just behind you with barely any notice. If it wasn't for the build up of magic that came right before they came through, Jim wasn't sure if even he would still be alive! Plus, those damn howls mean nothing. Not to say they aren't the actual wolves out there howling, but distance and direction seem to take a backseat in this maze.

Then, as the group turned a corner, another of the floor's oddities greeted them. Stone stairs that went up forever and yet somehow ended up coming out a hole in the ground soon after. Oh, and you could find holes that led downward. At least Jim was certain that there were multiple such stairs instead of just one.

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At one point, they had found a pair close together and confirmed they led to different places. Not that they doubted that the dungeon couldn't make them do so if it wanted to. Still, all they needed to do was find the way through. While there were spikes of difficulty, the floor overall was mostly walking.

That was probably the most dangerous part, in an ironic twist. All the strangely warped spaces, will-o-wisp lights, and wolves that can jump out of your own shadow. Yet it was the mindless walking around they had to do which caused the most trouble. It sapped their alertness and next thing you knew, there was a wolf pack around the corner or jumping out of a shadow next to you.

Some might say that just meant the wolves were dangerous and Jim wasn't going to say they weren't. It was just that they wouldn't be quite so deadly if everyone was able to stay alert.

Jim could only sigh as they once again found the entrance for what felt like the hundredth time. "Alright, time to leave. We've been lost for a good few hours at this point and I want a good meal for dinner."

As they left, Ally couldn't help but laugh and laugh and laugh. On the other hand, Doyle was just disappointed. It wasn't like the wheat was hidden. The patches of ready to harvest wheat might have still been taller than head-height, just to keep the theme going, but you could tell what they were.

The town even knew about them! They had harvested a few patches to help kick-start their farms after all. It was just that they had been unlucky and none of those wheat patches had been hiding a path.

So there they were, Jim and Ace alternately tromping through the 12th floor. Never quite killing all the wolves to force the way through to reveal itself and never bothering with harvesting the wheat to find it themselves. Worse, they seem to have gotten stuck in their mindset about the wheat patches being simple harvestable nodes.

With the way things were going, Doyle was worried that he would have to wait for someone else to make it to the floor. It wasn't like Doyle wanted the floor to be super hard for a normal group. He simply made sure that you had to take each type of special route at least once to get through the maze normally.

The original plan was that the windswept paths should have been the hardest. They only rarely pop up and quickly fade away if they aren't walked on quickly enough. Yet in Jim's last visit, his group managed to take three different windswept passages!

In theory, a group should only manage to take one of them as you're much more likely to find the other paths. Doyle just couldn't. He just couldn't at this point.

On the other hand, Ally just couldn't get enough of it! This was prime entertainment for her. Being able to watch the strongest people around walk in circles for hours, especially when they walk past so many wheat patches with paths behind them. She understood Doyle's point of view on this, though. It's like when a kid shows someone a drawing and the person guesses the completely wrong thing.

Then again, Doyle had assumed they would be a lot more happy about finding wheat. Not to say they weren't happy about it, just that the people who could get there right now had better things to do with their time. Oh, and they didn't tell the rest of the town about the wheat. Not to keep it a secret or anything. In fact, people knew about it since they did bring out a ton of the stuff a couple days in a row.

Rather, the problem is that they never mentioned what floor it was from. Both Ace and Jim felt it was important to keep just how many floors they had cleared a secret. So, if they revealed that floor twelve had wheat, that would reveal they had only recently gotten to floor twelve. After all, if they had discovered it sooner, they would have brought the wheat out sooner.

That meant even though people knew there was wheat to be had, they mostly figured it was out of their reach. Not that the twelfth floor isn't currently out of their reach, but it felt a lot more doable. Which in turn would have people growing until they do reach the floor.

Not that Doyle ever saw the twelfth floor wheat ever being as popular of a farming spot as the sixth. When you beat a cow, you get a pre-butchered cut of meat. When you cut down a field of wheat. You still have to process all that wheat and if you don't want to haul that much straw with you, part of the processing needs to happen in the dungeon. If people could defeat a wheat monster and receive a bag of flour, things might be different.

Doyle shakes his head, who is he trying to fool? The sixth floor works so well because you can teleport straight to it. With the eleventh floor in the way, the twelfth was destined to be unpopular. A normal person wouldn't want to battle through a tide of sprouts, just to harvest some wheat. Though if they ever got better spatial bags, Doyle could see some people making a job of it.

Of course, once the world energy outside matched or exceeded the twelfth floor, growing stuff out there would definitely be in vogue. More magic equals more better, after all. Not that it was a guarantee the energy level would match the floor, but it was quite likely. Ally wasn't too worried about that. Doyle, on the other hand hoped he could keep up with it since he had faith in his original world of origin.

Though Ally did admit that some signs pointed towards the world outside trending towards being magic rich. In particular, the fact one of his paths granted increased scaling on each floor's level range said things. While no one had found a direct link, it was generally accepted that dungeons were more likely to have higher level monsters, earlier on high magic worlds. That or grow floors at an astounding rate. So while Doyle hadn't gotten any modifiers on how much sapient sourced power he needed for a new floor, the extra monster levels wasn't something to sneeze at.

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